I'm guessing that many of the terms in this thread are buzzwords for many of us reading it :), since relatively few people work on mainframes.
I had not heard of the term buzzword bingo before, so I googled it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
Interesting. It aligns with my corporate experience in a few cases.
I'm nominating this video for the next Oscars, Grammies, or whatever the heck the movie awards are called (I don't keep track of such stuff). Bet it'll win gold in the under-1-minute category ;)
Are you saying the GP's statement is outright false?
Moreover the norm for zLinux system is to isolate guests with zVM, not LPARs. LPARs are more likely to be boundaries for chunkier workload definitions - that advice may have changed since I last cracked open a redbook; zVM offers similar isolation to what you'd see with KVM, VMWare, or other hardware-assisted hypervisors.
They’ve spent the last 60 years developing and refining everything for extreme levels of uptime and high availability. It’s truly unique to these mainframes because IBM controls every aspect of it. The closest equivalent of that kind of vertical integration is your Macbook Pro.
I highly doubt there are any brand new mainframe customers these days. But many of the biggest companies you know and use every single day have tons of workloads that will never move off of it.
But this doesn't say anything about "unbelievably powerful" or "feature-full" as in the OP?
The niche customer claim probably is "will never move off of it because nobody ever wants to touch millions of lines of COBOL" then that's fine. It's likely sane from a business perspective to continue using them as long as maintenance burden is manageable. Luckily managers in those more conservative companies consider full rewrites dangerous, rightly so. But in order to claim otherwise (i.e. unbelievably powerful and thus for everybody) we need to see numbers.
I pointed out that Redbook about HA features since it’s a major differentiator of mainframes even today, but there are also these that document other features:
https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248950.pdf#page...
https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf#page...
You can find 1 or more books that go into a deep dive of every chapter.
IBM has taken input from the biggest companies in the world over many decades to run as many of their workloads as possible. They’ve honed everything in their software and hardware to do so, down to developing specific cpu instructions to support specific use cases. If all of this doesn’t convey an extremely feature rich system, I’d like to hear why you think otherwise.
"Completely isolated in hardware" as in isolated by a software hypervisor (PR/SM) that doesn't have a whole lot of hardware support?
> Mainframes are built for different kinds of workloads. They are not cloud machines. They are batch machines with 6 or more nines of uptime.
That's kind of the point. What exactly is the niche, i.e. which new customer with exactly what software and latency requirements would switch from their current system to a z? IBM won't tell you apart from buzzword bingo.